November 9 was the birthday of Ignacy (Yitzkhok) Schiper, a Polish-Jewish historian after our own heart. In honor of his 50th birthday, in 1934, the journal Literarishe bleter published a retrospective on Schipers groundbreaking scholarship in Jewish social and economic history. Heres an excerpt: [Schiper] shows, along with his research of Jewish folk-culture, that even in the darkest eras of medieval Jewish history, a worldly Jewish mass life with folk celebrations and folk theater and the clear beginnings of a secular literature in Yiddish existed alongside religious-scholastic culture...He tells us about the rebellion of the small man, the commoner, against oligarchical and corrupt ruling clique of rabbis, community notables, and tax collectors; about the cultural opposition between the official religious-scholastic culture of the wealthy clerical class and the primitive, clumsy yet established secular culture of the Jewish folks-mentsh during the Middle Ages.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:50:23 +0000
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